Science
www.quantamagazine.org
[Archive link](https://ghostarchive.org/archive/3ekKT)
www.nature.com
A lack of funding and academic freedom amid a political crackdown leave scientists feeling hopeless and pondering an exodus from the country. [...] Scientists, some of whom spoke to Nature on the condition of anonymity because they fear retribution from the government, say that Venezuelan research was already censored and underfunded before the election, but that they anticipate things will get even worse. They point to a bill passed by Maduro’s administration last month that regulates non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which some researchers rely on for funding or to help publish their research. This latest chapter in Maduro’s reign could spell the end for independent science in the country, they say. “I am afraid to talk to you,” retired biologist Jaime Requena told Nature as he nervously prepared to leave the country, fearing that his passport would be confiscated by authorities to prevent his departure. “Science here is going down the drain quickly.” [...]
www.nature.com
The Nobel memorial prize in economics has been awarded to three U.S.-based academics who studied why some countries are rich and others poor and have documented that freer, open societies are more likely to prosper. The work by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson “demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity,” the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at the announcement in Stockholm. **Why are some countries richer than others?** In countries that were already rich, or were places where European settlers did not survive well because of illnesses or the climate, “colonial institutions were extractive”, Coyle says. “In contrast, in countries that were poorer to start with or had better climates, Europeans instead built more inclusive institutions similar to their own countries.” “The laureates demonstrated that the places that were, relatively speaking, the richest at their time of colonization are now among the poorest,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement. “When Europeans colonised large parts of the world, the existing institutions sometimes changed dramatically, but not in the same way everywhere. In some colonies, the purpose was to exploit the indigenous population and extract natural resources to benefit the colonizers. In other cases, the colonisers built inclusive political and economic systems.”
www.bbc.com
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to two scientists, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, for their work on machine learning, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden. American Professor John Hopfield, 91, is a professor at Princeton University in the US, and Prof Hinton, 76, is a professor at University of Toronto in Canada. [...] The Academy listed some of the crucial applications of the two scientists’ work, including improving climate modelling, development of solar cells, and analysis of medical images. [...] Professor Hinton is sometimes referred to as the "Godfather of AI". [His] pioneering research on neural networks paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT [...] He also said he uses the AI chatbot ChatGPT4 for many things now but with the knowledge that it does not always get the answer right. [...] Professor John Hopfield invented a network that can save and recreate patterns. It uses physics that describes a material’s characteristics due to atomic spin. In a similar way to how the brain tries to recall words by using associated but incomplete words, Prof Hopfield developed a network that can use incomplete patterns to find the most similar. [...] The Nobel Prize committee said the two scientists' work has become part of our daily lives, including in facial recognition and language translation. But Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said "its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future collectively".
www.bbc.com
Facilitated communication was created in 1977 by Australian disability advocate Rosemary Crossley, who died last year and left a complex legacy. To those who knew her, she’s remembered as champion for “people with little or no functional speech”. But others say her communications invention - and her formidable defence of it - were misguided and harmful. It is still used worldwide, despite being widely criticised. The first notable subject to use facilitated communication was Anne McDonald, a non-verbal Australian woman with cerebral palsy, a severe intellectual disability, and no control over her limbs. At the time, Crossley claimed that McDonald - then 16 - could communicate by pointing at magnetic letters while Crossley supported her upper arm. Within weeks McDonald was spelling out whole sentences and doing fractions, despite having no formal education and being institutionalised since age three. Some of Crossley’s colleagues expressed surprise that McDonald, who’d never read, could suddenly write eloquent prose, and cite literary references, when her arm was held by the highly educated Crossley. One who raised questions was the institution’s head paediatrician and psychiatrist Dr Dennis Maginn, who wouldn’t validate Crossley’s communication theory without independent testing. Advocates insist it is a miracle tool, one which gives disabled people a voice. But a growing chorus of experts, families and even former facilitators want it banned, due to research indicating that the likely author of the messages is the facilitator, not the communicator.
theconversation.com
Appropriate levels of physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep (collectively termed movement behaviours) are essential for the healthy growth and development of preschool-aged children. This was the impetus for creating the Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for the Early Years (birth to four years). Likewise, this is why the World Health Organization adopted the Canadian guidelines when creating the global guidelines on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep for children under five years of age. Considering the extensive benefits of movement behaviours, it is very alarming that a recent study found that only 14 per cent of preschoolers around the world are meeting movement behaviour guideline recommendations.
www.bbc.com
Over the past 10 years, rates of colorectal cancer among 25 to 49 year olds have increased in 24 different countries, including the UK, US, France, Australia, Canada, Norway and Argentina. The investigation's early findings, presented by an international team at the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) congress in Geneva in September 2024, were as eye-catching as they are concerning. [...] Breast cancer is one form of cancer where the trend is apparent. A new report from the ACS found that while deaths from breast cancer in women have dropped by around 10% in the past decade, incidence rates are rising by 1% per year overall – and 1.4% per year for women under the age of 50. [...] Cancer specialists say that patients presenting with diseases like pancreatic cancer, an illness where most people are diagnosed in their early 70s, are sometimes decades younger than would usually be expected. [...]
www.bbc.com
In May a huge iceberg broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf, drifted, and came to a stop - right in front of “maybe the world’s unluckiest” penguins. Like a door shutting, the iceberg's huge walls sealed off the Halley Bay colony from the sea. It seemed to spell the end for hundreds of newly-hatched fluffy chicks whose mothers, out hunting for food, may no longer have been able to reach them. Then, a few weeks ago, the iceberg shifted and got on the move again. Scientists have now discovered that the tenacious penguins found a way to beat the colossal iceberg - satellite pictures seen exclusively by BBC News this week show life in the colony. But scientists endured a long, anxious wait until this point - and the chicks face another potentially deadly challenge in the coming months. [...]
www.nature.com
A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells1. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body. “I can eat sugar now,” said the woman, who lives in Tianjing, on a call with Nature. It has been more than a year since the transplant, and, she says, “I enjoy eating everything — especially hotpot.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy. James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.”
www.hrw.org
Here is the report: [We Can’t Write the Truth Anymore’: Academic Freedom in Hong Kong Under the National Security Law (pdf)](https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/09/24/we-cant-write-truth-anymore/academic-freedom-hong-kong-under-national-security-0) - Academic freedom in Hong Kong has severely declined since the Chinese government imposed the draconian National Security Law on the city on June 30, 2020. - Students and faculty accustomed to academic freedom must now tread carefully to avoid retribution for what they teach, research, and publish, and even with whom they associate. - Concerned governments and foreign universities with partnerships with Hong Kong universities should speak up for affiliated academics and students, and review these partnerships to avoid becoming complicit in human rights violations. Academic freedom in Hong Kong has severely declined since the Chinese government imposed the draconian National Security Law on the city on June 30, 2020, Human Rights Watch and Hong Kong Democracy Council said in a report released today. The 80-page report, “‘We Can’t Write the Truth Anymore’: Academic Freedom in Hong Kong Under the National Security Law,” documents that long-protected civil liberties, including the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association, have been under assault in Hong Kong’s eight publicly funded universities. As these universities have become increasingly repressive, students and faculty widely self-censor, fearful of being targeted for harassment, retribution, and even prosecution for what they say and do both in the classroom and on campus.
www.frontiersin.org
Abstract (added emphasis and paragraphing): Anthropogenic **methane** (CH4) emissions increases from the period 1850–1900 until 2019 are **responsible for around 65% as much warming as carbon dioxide (CO2)** has caused to date, and large reductions in methane emissions are required to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. However, methane emissions **have been increasing rapidly** since ~2006. This study shows that emissions are expected to continue to increase over the remainder of the 2020s if no greater action is taken and that increases in atmospheric methane are thus far outpacing projected growth rates. This increase has important implications for reaching net zero CO2 targets: every 50 Mt CH4 of the sustained large cuts envisioned under low-warming scenarios that are not realized would eliminate about 150 Gt of the remaining CO2 budget. Targeted methane reductions are therefore a critical component alongside decarbonization to minimize global warming. We describe additional linkages between methane mitigation options and CO2, especially via land use, as well as their respective climate impacts and associated metrics. We explain why a net zero target specifically for methane is neither necessary nor plausible. Analyses show where reductions are most feasible at the national and sectoral levels given limited resources, for example, to meet the Global Methane Pledge target, but they also reveal large uncertainties. Despite these uncertainties, many mitigation costs are clearly low relative to real-world financial instruments and very low compared with methane damage estimates, but legally binding regulations and methane pricing are needed to meet climate goals.
www.lieffcabraser.com
https://www.lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/academic-journals/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/09/16/scientists-file-antitrust-lawsuit-against-six-journal-publishers/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/academic-publishers-face-class-action-over-peer-review-pay-other-restrictions-2024-09-13/ "On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, on behalf of a proposed class of scientists and scholars who provided manuscripts or peer review, alleging that these publishers conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research." "Deutsche Bank aptly describes the Scheme as a “bizarre” “triple pay system” whereby “the state funds most of the research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of the research, and then buys most of the published product.”"
www.salon.com
www.nature.com
> ## Abstract > Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island) is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world. It has captured the imagination of many owing to its archaeological record, which includes iconic megalithic statues called moai1. Two prominent contentions have arisen from the extensive study of Rapa Nui. First, the history of the Rapanui has been presented as a warning tale of resource overexploitation that would have culminated in a major population collapse—the ‘ecocide’ theory2,3,4. Second, the possibility of trans-Pacific voyages to the Americas pre-dating European contact is still debated5,6,7. Here, to address these questions, we reconstructed the genomic history of the Rapanui on the basis of 15 ancient Rapanui individuals that we radiocarbon dated (1670–1950 ce) and whole-genome sequenced (0.4–25.6×). We find that these individuals are Polynesian in origin and most closely related to present-day Rapanui, a finding that will contribute to repatriation efforts. Through effective population size reconstructions and extensive population genetics simulations, we reject a scenario involving a severe population bottleneck during the 1600s, as proposed by the ecocide theory. Furthermore, the ancient and present-day Rapanui carry similar proportions of Native American admixture (about 10%). Using a Bayesian approach integrating genetic and radiocarbon dates, we estimate that this admixture event occurred about 1250–1430 ce.
www.scientificamerican.com
I believe the problem is never showing evidence, but that the evidence is overwhelming. I could explain the general idea and, maybe, one or two specifics. People that use the XX/XY binary argument wouldn’t be able to explain either, but it’s usually only used because it conforms to a bias. And we are only talking about humans here. Language would implode if we tried to maintain convenient binaries and still back it up with science.
www.bbc.com
A US military veteran who received the world's first whole-eye transplant has made significant progress a year later and has been able to resume his normal life, researchers say. Aaron James, 46, also received a rare partial-face transplant. He lost most of his face in an accident in 2021 while working as a high-voltage utility lineman. His donor eye has so far maintained normal pressure and blood flow and retained its size, unlike donor eyes in animals that often shrink after transplants, researchers at NYU Langone Health said in a new study. Mr James has not regained sight in that eye, but researchers are hopeful he might eventually be able to see out of it again. [...] Last May, he underwent 21 hours of surgery that involved more than 140 healthcare professionals. The donated face and eye came from a single male donor in his 30s. During the surgery, doctors injected adult stem cells from the donor's bone marrow into the optic nerve to encourage its repair. [...] The 46-year-old military veteran is only the 19th person in the US to undergo a face transplant and the first person in the world to receive an entire human eye transplant.
dialogo-americas.com
China’s influence increasingly threatens the academic world in Brazil. In recent years, the country’s main higher education institutions, such as the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), have established partnerships with Chinese institutions at an ever-increasing rate. Experts warn of the risks of this growing soft power that Beijing uses to promote the Chinese model. “China’s influence on Brazilian universities has never been greater,” journalist Gabriel de Arruda Castro, editor of Brazilian daily Gazeta do Povo, told Diálogo. “Obviously, this **opens the door to the presence of representatives of an authoritarian regime**, which is not the case when Brazil establishes academic partnerships with countries like Germany or France.” [...] **Although agreements between Brazilian and foreign universities are common, Castro points out that these countries respect the independence and academic autonomy of their teaching centers. Chinese universities, on the other hand, are subject to the strict control of the Beijing government. “From the point of view of the Chinese regime, it doesn’t make any sense to fund any project that might be critical of the Chinese model,” says Castro.** [...] Part of the Chinese influence in Brazilian universities is exerted through partnerships with the Confucius Institute, an entity linked to the Chinese Ministry of Education, whose official mission is to spread Chinese culture and language. [...] On August 13, 2020, the U.S. State Department designated the Confucius Institute as a “foreign mission” of China, noting that it promotes “Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign” in classrooms. [...] In 2023, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) called the Confucius Institute a tool of political influence. “China’s activities and forms of cooperation threaten to undermine academic freedom in the field of education and research,” the BfV said in its annual report, German news agency Deutsche Welle reported. [...] “Obviously, the official view of the regime is not challenged in these cases. The promotion of Chinese culture is therefore mixed with the promotion of the Chinese regime,” says Castro. “In my research, I didn’t find any perspective critical of China.” [...] He believes there may be a **risk of espionage** by China in these initiatives. “Perhaps because it is not perceived as a direct adversary of China, Brazil has a little less of this aspect [of espionage]. But perhaps there is ‘soft espionage’ here: knowing where Brazil stands in certain areas of knowledge, in order to later use this as a strategic advantage in a possible competition in some area or to offer solutions,” he says. “**This is more or less what it [China] does in Africa** by other means. In other words: meeting local demand pragmatically at first, but making these countries increasingly dependent on China,” Castro added. [...]
interestingengineering.com
Edit: The paper is total nonsense. Sorry for wasting people's time. https://youtu.be/Yk_NjIPaZk4?si=dasxM2Py-s654djW
Here is the study: http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg0344 A deadly pandemic has decimated bats in North America — and that has ultimately had harmful effects on humans, including higher rates of infant mortality, according to a new study. The research is part of growing evidence that humans rely on the animal and plant species around them, and are harmed when those species decline or go extinct. White-nose syndrome is a deadly fungal disease that kills an average of 70 per cent of bats it infects, and has been spreading to new areas since it was first reported on the continent in 2006. [...] Ecologists know that bats play a crucial role in eating up and controlling insect pests. Because of that, Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, decided to look at what happened when white-nose syndrome spread into new counties in the eastern U.S., decimating bat populations. He found that farmers responded to the resulting insect outbreaks by increasing their pesticide use 31 per cent. Pesticides are toxic, and often associated with human health impacts such as increases in infant deaths. Frank found that infant mortality went up eight per cent after the arrival of white-nose syndrome in a county, according to his study published today in the journal Science. [...] **The study shows how interactions between species such as bats and insects stabilize the ecosystems that other species rely on, including humans, who can be harmed when those species disappear, Frank said.** "These ecosystems are very complex systems with many interactions between species, and we do not fully understand what to expect or what will happen when we allow one species to fall below some viable population level or to go extinct," said Frank, who had previously linked the deaths of half a million people in India to the collapse of local vulture populations due to accidental poisoning.
www.vox.com
[Archived version](http://web.archive.org/web/20240906154920/https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/368350/scientific-research-fraud-crime-jail-time) You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him. Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s. One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly. The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. A 2012 inquiry by Erasmus Medical School, his employer, into allegations of misconduct found that he “used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and… submitted to conferences [reports] which included knowingly unreliable data.” Poldermans admitted the allegations and apologized, while stressing that the use of fictitious data was accidental.
